3:AM Magazine

Our call for nominations to determine the 50 Least Influential People in Publishing has attracted a fair bit of attention. Inevitably, many people have nominated themselves. Please keep your nominations coming. We’re looking for the names of very talented writers, publishers, literary critics, journalists and bloggers who are currently neglected by mainstream publishing. HP Tinker is the prime example: a brilliant young writer who has been on the verge of breaking through for the past five years or so, but hasn’t quite made it. Anyway, here is the longlist in its present, gloriously incomplete state (I haven’t included people like Irvine Welsh who are clearly far too famous):

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I would add in 2 others…
1)Chris McCabe, a young and truly innovative poet whose debut “The Hutton Report” was published by Salt Publishing last year, and we’ve printed a number of his early poems in Lamport Court.http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1844710742.htm
2) Chris Gribble, who is director of the Manchester Literature Festival this autumn, which takes over from the Manchester Poetry Festival, which he ran for a number of years with Ric Michael. Unlike other literature festivals this one is going to concentrate on the new and innovative. http://www.mlfestival.co.uk/
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Tindal Stree Press from Birmingham – independent publisher committed to novels and short stories from outside the London Oxbridge circle, only been going for five years and have already had one of their novels short listed for the Booker Prize in 2003 – and their writers regularly win awards. Great ethos, passion and belief in giving a home to quality literature – the independent spirit incarnate.

Well, of course people are going to nominate themselves. Nobody thinks he or she is influential enough, and if he or she would write “they” in the first clause of this sentence, he or she probably doesn’t deserve to be influential.

Like these guys, I think I belong on the list. But a true list of the fifty least influential people in publishing would be people who nobody knew enough to nominate, right? Not even themselves because they’re not influential enough to know about this list.

All these people do have a measure of influence. I mean, I’ve heard of nearly everyone on the list, read stuff by most of them, and slept with some of them — not that it’s done me much good, of course.

A really un-influential person would not even have a blog, would they? (Okay, forget what I said about grammar before.) They’d be standing on a street corner — say 86th and Broadway or Bedford Ave. and North 7th St. — trying to sell you their POD books. At least that’s what has worked to keep me from having any influence whatsoever.

Well, of course people are going to nominate themselves. Nobody thinks he or she is influential enough, and if he or she would write “they” in the first clause of this sentence, he or she probably doesn’t deserve to be influential.

Like these guys, I think I belong on the list. But a true list of the fifty least influential people in publishing would be people who nobody knew enough to nominate, right? Not even themselves because they’re not influential enough to know about this list.

All these people do have a measure of influence. I mean, I’ve heard of nearly everyone on the list, read stuff by most of them, and slept with some of them — not that it’s done me much good, of course.

A really un-influential person would not even have a blog, would they? (Okay, forget what I said about grammar before.) They’d be standing on a street corner — say 86th and Broadway or Bedford Ave. and North 7th St. — trying to sell you their POD books. At least that’s what has worked to keep me from having any influence whatsoever.

Guess I’ll have to vote for myself. I wasn’t even sure there was going to be a list, thought it was impossible, just wanted to throw in a link to my novel. Like Richard said, wouldn’t those on the list by definition have more influence than those not? Sorry, I grew up in Australia.

“Another call for Georgy Riecke and those behind Underneath the Bunker. They deserve credit alone for choosing to have a website with a purely dark grey background. They most trust the power of words…”

Well thank you for the nomination to whoever did it, my votes as far as other writers go to the tireless Lee Rourke at Scarecrow and Heidi James (although at the rate theyre going they may be on the most influential list by next year, like Tom McCarthy)

And I would cast an un-vote for Steve M. at This Space simply because he trashed my book without having even read a copy. Not that it pissed me off or anything.

I vote for Gina Holmes of Novel Journey. Not only is she working hard interviewing great authors like Frank Peretti and Walter Wangerin Jr on her blog, Novel Journey, she is a fantastic writer in her own rite. She’s starting her third novel while trying to find a publisher for her second novel, The Demon Chaser. She spends hours of her days promoting other authors, reviewing novels, and providing a place for novelists to network.

Hate to be the kind of person who goes to websites and points this kind of thing out, but it seemed glaringly obvious to me: there are hardly any women on that list at all. Or does that mean that the (very large) percentage of women in publishing are all influential (I can believe that).

I’d like to nominate myself, just for my sheer ability to appear in context with so many literary things, to reach honorary mention status repeatedly, to publish in multiple genres over a period of decades, and still remain relatively tranpsarent. Apparently, I can run down the corridors of the literary world naked, and I’m allowed this privilege, though no one is likely to notice (lol). Besides, I’m witty, clever, and deserving.

I would like to vote for two people. The first would be poet and essayist Dan Schneider with his website Cosmoetica.com. I’ve been reading it for several years now, and I’m shocked this guy hasn’t been swiped up by some big publishing house. His poems are complex and lack cliches, and he has a detalied sense of the arts, as shown in his reviews. Even if you don’t agree with all his opinions, they are still worth reading.

The second person I’d like to vote for is ironically someone Schneider lists in his ‘neglected poets’ page. Poet James Emanuel- some of his poems can be read on Schneider’s site, as well as some legnthy criticism regarding Emanuel’s work. This guy has been ignored his whole life, and reading about him whetted my interest and I ordered Emanuel’s book online. I think these two artists deserve greater than what they’ve gotten, which has been quite little, when compared to most lesser writers out there.

I came across my name on this list in a google search. I’m not sure who nominated me, but I’m flattered. I noticed that a few people mentioned that there needed to be women on this list, so if there is still nominating going on for this I want to add Ellen Datlow. I wrote a quick bio of her accomplishments below and included a link to her website.

For more than a quarter of a century, Ellen Datlow has been responsible for helping to shape the voice of contemporary fantastic literature (esp. horror and science fiction). Starting in the ’80’s, Datlow was fiction editor of OMNI for over seventeen years and after OMNI she went on to create the award-winning website Event Horizon with her former OMNI colleagues. She was also editor of SCI FICTION at the SCIFI Channel’s website for six years. She has edited the horror half of the The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for going on 20 years (the first 16 volumes edited with Terri Windling and all subsequent volumes with Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant). With Windling, she also co-edited six-volumes of adult fairy tales, two children’s fairy tale anthologies, three young adult anthologies, and an erotic fantasy anthology. Solo, she has edited ten anthologies including most recently The Dark: New Ghost Stories (Tor, 2006) and Inferno (due from Tor in 2007).

Datlow has won several awards for her editorial work including seven World Fantasy Awards, two Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, Three Hugo Awards, and the Locus Award.